China’s Origin Quantum Has Raised Funds to Catch Up With IBM

(AsiaNikkei) Chinese quantum computing company Origin Quantum has raised additional funds in a Series A funding round in its bid to catch up with such leading players in the field as IBM and Google.
The round was led by China Internet Investment Fund, a government-affiliated fund, with additional participants, including China Reform Fund and CCB International.
The money raised will be spent on the development and production of quantum computers and quantum chips, and research on such core technologies as quantum measurement and control.
In the past, Origin Quantum raised funds in an angel round from such investors as CASSTAR.
Founded in 2017 as a spinoff from the Key Laboratory of Quantum Information at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Origin Quantum is developing quantum computers based upon both superconducting and silicon dot technology.
The company’s research and development operations are led by two top Chinese quantum computing scientists, Guo Guangcan and Guo Guoping. The core of the R&D team is composed of experts with computer science and physics doctorates from CAS. The R&D staff, which comprises mainly young experts born in the 1990s, makes up 75% of the firm’s overall workforce. Headquartered in Hefei, in China’s Anhui Province, Origin Quantum has branch offices in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, and Shenzhen.
Origin Quantum is seeking to become a full-stack quantum computing company, which means doing everything from design and fabrication of quantum computing hardware based on quantum bits, or qubits, and quantum chips, to packaging the architecture needed to control the chips. It also offers a quantum computing cloud service that provides early hands-on experience with writing and testing software. Its key rivals are Google, IBM and Rigetti Computing, a Berkeley-based startup.